Making Effective Decisions SCS Example Statement (750 Words)

SAs director of resources in a national public body with a £240m annual budget and 4,200 staff, I led our response when the spending settlement required £14m of savings within eighteen months. The chief executive ruled out an equal 6% trim everywhere, arguing it would punish high-performing services and hollow out frontline delivery that 2 million citizens relied on. Four directorates, each convinced of its own case for protection, had to share the reduction. The board needed a defensible allocation within ten weeks.

TAs director of resources I owned both the process and the final recommendation: deciding where the £14m would come from, on what evidence, and through a process fair enough that all four directors, the executive team and the board would accept and implement it. The decision had to balance statutory duties, frontline impact, deliverability and staff morale, and it had to survive challenge from directors with direct lines to the chair.

AI decided early that how the decision was made would determine whether it stuck, so I designed the process before touching the numbers. First, I agreed decision criteria with the board upfront, before any directorate saw a figure: impact on statutory services, demand trends over three years, efficiency relative to comparable bodies, and the realistic deliverability of each saving. Publishing criteria in advance meant directors argued to the tests rather than to their own budgets. Second, I built a common evidence base so nobody could win with better slides. My finance team produced a standard analysis pack for each directorate covering cost per service user, demand forecast, benchmarked unit costs and vacancy rates, and every director was given the same two weeks to challenge their own pack's accuracy. Two did, and correcting those errors early prevented the whole exercise being discredited later. Third, I generated real options rather than a single plan. I modelled three allocations: a pure efficiency option targeting the highest-cost services, a demand-led option protecting growing services, and a hybrid. Each showed explicitly which services shrank and what the citizen impact would be, including an equality impact assessment for every material change, because three of the candidate cuts affected services used heavily by disabled and older people. The hybrid protected 90% of frontline capacity and found £9m from genuinely lower-value activity, but it still left £5m to find, and the hard question was our policy and research directorate, excellent work that was nonetheless discretionary. Before finalising, I pressure-tested the emerging recommendation from three directions: I asked internal audit to review the savings for double-counting, which found £700,000 of overlap I corrected; I ran confidential one-to-one sessions with each director so their objections were heard privately and answered on evidence, which converted two of them from opponents to reluctant supporters; and I tested the riskiest assumption, that digital self-service could absorb 30% of contact centre demand, by piloting it in one region for four weeks rather than trusting the supplier's projection. The pilot showed 22%, so I scaled that saving back by £800,000 and made it up from an estates consolidation I had been holding in reserve. I recommended the hybrid to the board: £9m from back-office and estates, £3m from a phased reduction in discretionary research with a two-year review, and £2m from digital channel shift, phased over eighteen months with a quarterly delivery board I would chair, plus a £1m contingency so services were not at risk if one saving slipped. I presented it as one integrated package rather than four separate cuts. Because I knew the decision would leak within hours, I had prepared the communications in advance: I briefed the chief executive and chair the evening before, gave every director a personal walkthrough of their own figures before the board met, and published an all-staff explanation the same day setting out the criteria, the process and what had been protected. The union described the process publicly as tough but honest, and no directorate appealed.

RThe board approved the allocation unanimously, including the votes of the two directors whose budgets were cut. Eighteen months later we had delivered £13.2m of the £14m, frontline service volumes fell by less than 1%, and staff survey scores in the affected directorates held steady. Our annual audit letter praised the evidence base behind the savings, the equality impact assessments meant no legal challenge, and the demand-led allocation model has since been adopted for our next two budget rounds. Two other public bodies have asked to reuse the approach.